It was 2006, when it was first revealed that Falun Gong practitioners are secretly being killed for their bodily organs at the hands of the Chinese Communist regime.

After the highly publicized Kilgour–Matas reports were released, and under the glare of the upcoming 2008 Beijing Olympics, many thought this atrocity would have stopped. But it didn’t says Ethan Gutmann, an investigative journalist, and China analyst.

“By 2008, many analysts – I was among them – assumed the Chinese state would stop harvesting prisoners of conscience for fear of international condemnation during the Beijing Olympics,” Gutmann told the Congressional-Executive Commission on China on September 18 in Washington D.C.

“Yet the physical examination of Falun Gong prisoners for their retail organs actually showed a slight uptick,” he said.

Gutmann earlier told the commission the persecution of the Falun Gong meditation practice began in 1999, and by the following year hospitals across China were “ramping up their facilities for what would become an unprecedented explosion in China’s transplant activity”.

By the end of 2000, Gutmann said, more than a million Falun Gong practitioners had been incarcerated.

“By 2001, Chinese military hospitals were unambiguously targeting select Falun Gong prisoners for harvesting,” he said. “By 2003, the first Tibetans were being targeted as well.”

Other prisoners of conscience, such as Uyghurs and House Christians, have also been targeted, and killed for their organs but to a lesser extent.

Gutmann also features in the organ harvesting documentary Hard to Believe which will be broadcast on PBS. See the trailer below:

Importantly, Gutmann also gave the commission details on what has been occurring over the past several years.

“Fatally exposed, Chinese medical authorities declared to the Western press that they would cease organ harvesting of death-row prisoners over the next five years. Yet no mention was made of prisoners of conscience, and third-party verification was rejected.”

Former Communist Party high flyer Bo Xilai (left), and former Chongqing police chief Wang Lijun who defected to a U.S. Consulate in 2012. (Image: Epoch Times)

“It is during this period, from 2012 to the present day – even as Chinese medical authorities spoke publicly of shortages due to relying on voluntary organ donation – that a very strange anomaly occurs,” Gutmann added.

“While China’s hospitals have maintained strict Internet silence on their transplant activities since 2006, the hiring of transplant teams at many of the most notorious hospitals for harvesting prisoners of conscience is actually on the increase. In a handful of hospitals – for example, Beijing 309 military hospital – it’s practically exponential.”

Gutmann confirmed that witness accounts show why this is occurring.

“One spoke to me about over 500 Falun Gong prisoners having been examined for their organs in a single day,” he said, further describing it as the “largest cattle call” that he knew of.

He also heard from a Western doctor that a Chinese military hospital surgeon made assurances that prisoners are still being slaughtered for their organs

“Falun Gong practitioners across China’s provinces have described police forcibly administering blood tests, and DNA cheek swabs – not in prison; not in a detention center, but in their homes,” he said.

A painting from the Art of Zhen, Shan, Ren (Truth, Compassion, Tolerance) International Exhibition that depicts the forced organ harvesting from a Falun Gong practitioner in China.

Gutmann went on to say that official Chinese numbers of transplants done each year –10,000 – is fictional.

“The real number is likely [to be] three times that [number],” he said.

“And the serial public declarations by the Chinese medical establishment of a new ethical environment for transplantation is simply a privacy shield to murder of prisoners of conscience.”

See all the presentations given at the Congressional-Executive Commission on China hearing in the video below. The hearing was held in advance of the planned state visit by Chinese President Xi Jinping to the U.S.:

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